Traduttore, traditore: “The translator is a traitor.” Given the frequency with which this cliché is deployed in studies of translation, its implication remains somewhat enigmatic. At times it is the original author who is betrayed, at other times the reader, or even the text itself. Regardless of who or what the translator betrays, the sense of betrayal generally arises from the translator's failure to perform the impossible task of seamlessly transferring meaning from one language to another. With one eye on this aspect of translation's unavoidable treachery, Serk-Bae Suh's Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s asks whether the translator might also betray by performing this task too successfully. In other words, it may not be the inevitable loss of meaning or aesthetic quality in the process of translation—but rather the loss of alterity itself as translation performs its domesticating function—that constitutes an ethical problem. Through a painstaking exploration of translation in the context of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Suh's eye-opening book brings the complex and impactful history of Korean and Japanese cultural nationalism into conversation with what has been termed the “ethical turn” in critical theory.

Treacherous Translation builds on the work of scholars such as Tejaswini Niranjana, Naoki Sakai, and Lydia Liu to challenge the common understanding of translation as the transparent movement of meaning across languages, where each language is understood as an internally homogenous entity. Particularly in the non-Western contexts explored by these authors, translation is an inherently political undertaking that creates the very linguistic equivalents on which it appears to be founded. Moreover, the creation of such equivalents occurs asymmetrically, mirroring the power structures of colonial domination. Nevertheless, as Suh argues convincingly, through a deft handling of Korean- and Japanese-language sources, both colonizer and colonized relied on the view of translation as an equal exchange to imagine essentialized national communities for themselves. Japanese imperial rhetoric utilized this logic to insist on an unbridgeable difference between ethnic Japanese and Koreans in order to justify ongoing discrimination, whereas Korean intellectuals insisted on their own unique language and culture to carve out an autonomous space within the Japanese Empire. It is this reliance on the same essentialist understanding of language, culture, and nation as the colonizer that prevented (and still prevents) Korean nationalism from offering a “radical critique” of Japanese colonialism (pp. xviii–xix).

One of the strengths of Suh's book is its trenchant criticism of Korean nationalist discourse, which he sustains without veering into apology for Japanese imperialism. As Suh demonstrates repeatedly throughout the book, this is a difficult line to walk. The key to achieving this feat is the book's theoretical framework, which insists on “a different view of translation as an ethical as well as political practice” (p. xix). This ethical view of translation is developed largely through engagement with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, who sought to challenge the dominance of ontology in Western metaphysics by arguing that ethics—arising at the moment of the self's contact with an other—is irreducible to ontological concerns. What does Levinas's philosophical project have to do with translation? As Suh explains, Levinas was concerned with language as a medium through which encounters with the other become possible. Drawing a distinction between “the Saying” and “the Said,” the latter referring to the thematizing or referential content of language and the former describing its quality of being addressed to an interlocutor, Levinas argues that the ethical quality of the Saying can never be fully subsumed by the Said. Translation, then, understood as the assimilation of an inaccessible Saying into a Said that can be absorbed by the self, betrays the radical alterity of the other.

A more sustained focus on the ethical consequences of translation in colonial and postcolonial Korea could have strengthened the book even further, as the chapters most directly engaged with this line of thinking are perhaps the most valuable. Chapter 2 is where Suh really develops the idea of translation as ethical practice. Through close reading of Korean and Japanese responses to the Japanese-language staging of the Korean traditional tale Ch'unhyangjŏn, he points out that whether critics praised or panned the play, they relied on an understanding of translation as equal exchange, and thus failed to form a politics that could be critical of Japanese colonial expansion. Similarly, chapter 4, which shifts to the postwar period, examines a controversy over Japanese critic Tōma Seita's readings of Korean lyrical poems as allegories for colonial oppression. Tōma's commentary attempts to evaluate literature of the “other” positively and establish solidarities, but ultimately proves unable to avoid the epistemological violence of reducing the other in all its complexity to a totalized caricature. In both instances, Suh argues that translation reframed as an ethical activity can provide the basis for more productive engagement with the other. Levinas's notion of the self's infinite indebtedness to the other requires both Japan's ongoing acknowledgment of responsibility for colonization and war atrocities as well as Korea's introspection on its complicity with efforts to further colonize the Asian continent, without implying symmetry or equivalence between the two. As nationalist histories persist on both sides of the Strait, Treacherous Translation remains a crucial intervention.